Less smoking may have aided drop in disease

Higher percentage of women now getting lung cancer, Time says, despite dip in mortality rates

Women now account for "disproportionately high number" of lung cancer diagnoses.

That's true despite overall mortality rates having "fallen significantly in recent decades" — and in spite of women traditionally having "smoked less than men and thus developed and died from lung cancer less often."

At least that's the conclusion of an article in Time magazine by Jamie Ducharme, a piece from the end of last year just sent to me by a friend for this blog.

Ducharme's story indicates that part of the reason for the overall dip in the disease, the most deadly form of cancer in the United States, is because medical advances have been occurring for decades, and because there have been major decreases in smoking.

But the "why" of the shift from "what was historically a men's disease" apparently is not apparent. 

Alice Berger, PhD.

"It's completely unknown right now," Time quotes Alice Berger, a Ph.D. who researches genetics and cancer at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

And Dr. Ahmedin Jemal, co-author of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, is also quoted as saying "smoking habits cannot totally explain the demographic shifts" even though his 2018 report "showed that "rates of long-cancer incidence actually rose over the past 20 years among women born around either 1950 or 1960."

Researchers have determined, in fact, that "the type of lung cancer most common among nonsmokers disproportionately affect women, and young women are more likely to have a gene mutation often found in the tumors of nonsmokers."

The mutation, not incidentally, does respond well to newer targeted therapies, Berger notes in the piece. 

She also repeats a theory that "quirks of female sex hormones or women's immune systems could be responsible" for the disproportion.

A lot more information on scientific research can be found in "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers.

Docs still unsure how to quash metastases

Women most likely to die of breast cancer have been getting the least attention, says Time mag excerpt 

Women with breast cancer that has metastasized are rarely the focus of breast-cancer research.

At least that's the position taken by health-care journalist Kate Pickert in a recent Time magazine excerpt from her book, "Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America."

In the piece, Pickert notes that three-quarters of the 160,000 U.S. females who live with with metastases were originally diagnosed with early stages of the disease. 

And she quotes Lianne Kraemer, whose breast cancer has spread and formed tumors inside her brain, resulting in her being labeled a terminal patient, as bemoaning that "I believed the narrative that is pushed on women, that if you check your breasts and if you catch it early, you're fine."

But, she says, "you can do everything right and still end up metastatic."

Pickert, who herself was diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer in 2014 at age 35, claims that many "women who die of breast cancer succumb to the disease for no other reason that that it manages to outwit the protocols" — even for those who have access to high-quality treatment and don't ignore signs of the disease until it's incurable. 

Dr. Cyrus Ghajar

The Time excerpt also quotes Dr. Cyrus Ghajar, a cancer biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who pointed out that the Cancer Moonshot, a National Cancer Institute initiative launched by President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, "does not explicitly provide funding to address the challenges of metastatic cancer."

Ergo, he asks, "How can you have a moon shot trying to cure cancer and not mention people dying of cancer?"

Ghajar, whom the article cites as "one of the relatively small number of scientists studying metastatic breast cancer full time," is also quoted as indicating that "25 percent to 40 percent of early-stage breast-cancer patients already have cancer cells in their bone marrow, and these patients are, on average, three times more likely than those who don't to develop other metastases later."

While asserting that women most likely to die of breast cancer have gotten the least attention, Pickert admits that pharmaceutical companies and researchers do "often test new drugs on metastatic patients before anyone else" — albeit because they are "women who are dying anyway, and they are the ones most willing to be part of experiments."

About 40,000 American women die of the disease each year, the article reports, adding that physicians still don't know "why some breast cancers eventually form deadly metastases or how to quash the disease once it has spread."

As a result, the excerpt continues, patients with metastatic disease "are typically treated with one drug after another, their doctors switching the medications whenever the disease stops responding to treatment. Eventually, nearly all patients with breast-cancer metastases run out of options and die."

Those interested in additional details about metastases can find them in "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at caregivers.

Actress pushes women's mental, physical health

Angelina Jolie promoting care for breast cancer patients, especially through loved ones, docs, research

More and more, Academy Award-winning actress Angelina Jolie is becoming known for her work outside Tinseltown.

Such as promoting caregiving for breast cancer patients — not only in regard to the care of loved ones but other aspects pertaining to "mental and emotional health, and physical safety."

Angelina Jolie

In a piece she wrote for a recent edition of Time magazine, Jolie, who's gained even more fame as a special envoy of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, explains that "care is not just about medical treatments. It's also about the safety, dignity and support afforded to women, whether they're battling cancer or trying to manage other stressful situations."

Far too often, her column indicates, "they're not given nearly enough."

Jolie had a prophylactic double mastectomy in 2013 — plus surgery two years afterward to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes — because she'd learned through a genetic test that she carried a mutation of the BRCA1 gene, which sharply increased her chances of developing breast and ovarian cancer.

The surgeries reduced but didn't eliminate those chances. With the operations, she writes, she had an estimated risk of 87 percent of getting breast cancer, 50 percent of ovarian.

Without the mutation, women typically have a 13 percent risk of breast cancer.

But Jolie, a contributing editor of Time, insists that without proper care, a female patient can fall apart not only because of risks of disease like cancer but "because of other pressures in her life that receive no attention at all…her family situation, her safety and whether she is carrying stress that is undermining her health and making her days much more difficult."

It should not take "someone getting sick to realize that faring for them and not harming them is necessary," she insists.

The now 44-year-old Jolie, who'd lost both mother and grandmother to breast cancer before their late 50s, adds that although there's been rapid progress in technology and science since her surgeries that can help "more people survive in the future and [be] able to live better lives during their illness," there's still "no reliable screening test for ovarian or prostate cancer…and no effective treatment for the most aggressive forms of breast cancer, known as triple negative cancers."

The actress, daughter of actor Jon Voight, while maintaining that care and support of loved ones is the most important factor in women's ability to cope with cancer and to face even the possibility of the disease, cites other related problems that plague modern females — post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, "anxiety, psychological distress, sexual violence and domestic violence."

And then, she writes, there's "poor mental health" stemming from "discrimination, overwork, poverty, malnutrition, low social status and unremitting responsibility for the care of others."

Care for patients is an integral part of "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers.

Coffee, tea join list of 80 cancer-causing agents

Super-hot drinks can trigger disease, says a 10-country arm of World Health Organization 

Damn, that coffee's hot!

Well, that very pick-me-up — or similarly super-hot drinks — are not only likely to burn your tongue, they might well be cancer triggers.

According to an article by Alice Park in the current Time magazine, the World Health Organization (WHO) says liquids such as coffee and tea belong on the list of cancer-causing agents.

An organizational arm of WHO, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), checked 1,000 studies that looked into links between high-temp drinks and various forms of the disease and found anything above 149 degrees fahrenheit hikes the risk of esophageal cancer.

Dr. Otis Brawley

The conclusions of that study by the IARC, which is composed of 23 scientists from 10 countries, were published recently in Lancet Oncology.

As with virtually every piece of research, however, there's another side.

Dr. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society's chief medical and scientific officer, believes smoking and excessive alcohol are much bigger perils, the Time piece notes.

Interested in more info on some of the 79 other substances — including exposure to UV radiation from the sun, air pollution, red meat and DDT — that can be cancer risk factors? Check out "Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer," a VitalityPress book I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at male caregivers.